Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Set Design: On Your Mark...

Readers, you delivered! We received more than twice as many pitches as we needed. Jay, Daniel, metaghost, Chah, and I have spent the last few days narrowing our pool to a selection of eight compelling pitches for sets. In doing so, we've had to pass up some great designs. Furthermore, some of our chosen sets have great premises, but the submitted cards haven't yet lived up to their potential. That's where you come in!

The chosen pitches will be posted soon. (Within 24 hours, most likely.) Once they're up, you can decide which pitches you're most excited about, and brainstorm cards and mechanics for them. After a few days of discussion, I'll post the round two challenge.

Anyone (except for the blog authors, since we'll be judging them) can submit a round two challenge. The only restriction is that you may not submit a round two challenge for a set that you designed in round one. That's right: everyone except the original designer is allowed to submit a round two challenge for that set. Of course, the original designer is welcome to comment on their own pitch, and they can also submit a round two challenge for somebody else's set.

Please remember: this is not a design competition. We did not pick the eight sets with the best existing cards, or the eight sets whose authors demonstrated the best design skill. We picked a combination of eight sets that we thought had the potential to get our readership as a whole interested in designing them. We wanted every reader to find some pitch genuinely exciting, which meant avoiding some safer choices and trying out ideas that have major unsolved problems. Some of these will crash and burn, and some will soar like eagles. Which is which? It's up to you.

Yes! In these early rounds, diversity is great because we won’t yet have clear favorites and may have ideas to move less coherent ideas along a path. In later rounds when we have sets we like more than others, it makes sense to limit the number of them we can contribute designs for.

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About Us

We met as competitors and collaborators in the second Great Designer Search. After the contest was over, we decided we still had things to say about designing Magic: the Gathering. So we started a blog.